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Alan Bennett: Political Playwright

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Richard Scarr
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Abstract

Alan Bennett is one of the most popular mainstream dramatists working in Britain today, his canon now a mainstay of regional and amateur theatre companies. Yet for a writer who was once compared to John Osborne as taking ‘the moral temperature of the nation’, his output is widely regarded as apolitical and, at worst, ‘safe’. In the following article, Richard Scarr suggests that this viewpoint is misleading, and argues that Bennett is not only one of the most politically contentious playwrights in dominant theatre, but that the ideological viewpoints he has supported have changed as his career has progressed. Richard Scarr is an English graduate of the University of North London, and has recently completed an MA in Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary and Westfield College. He is currently researching a PhD on the rhetoric of Renaissance comedy, with particular emphasis on the double-entendre.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 12 , Issue 48 , November 1996 , pp. 309 - 322
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

Notes and References

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2. Similar status was later awarded to the first stage plays of both Eric Idle and Michael Palin, stars of television's Monty Python's Flying Circus, a show whose comedic influence was as important in the 'seventies as Beyond the Fringe's was in the 'sixties. More recently, in 1995, BBC2's The Day Today's Patrick Marber had his first play, Dealer's Choice, open at the Cottesloe before transferring to the Vaudeville.

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